Industry: The Distributist Solution

January 31, 2011

The mention of Distributism often draws skepticism by those who, while valuing its merits, believe Distributism incapable of providing satisfactory answers to our modern needs. From chewing gum to automobiles, chairs to food stuffs or toys to beer, we live in a world consumed by and dependent on mass-produced goods and large-scale industry. The distributist’s reputation for favoring small-scale production, usually “mom and pop” and mostly local, appears to conflict with computer chips, fax machines, and high-rise construction. Any expectation of the family business replacing our automotive, aerospace, or shipping industries seems dubious at best. Doubt lingers whether a Distributive State can be competent in facing the challenges left over by the failures of Socialism and Capitalism.

In anticipation of any discussion about Distributist reforms such as worker-owned businesses, micro-credit, or social investing, which can (and have) successfully taken over medium and large-scale operations, we should explore why G.K. Chesterton, while never denying the presence of the factory or the value of employment in a Distributive State, believed large-scale industry took a back seat to small producers and self-ownership.

As editor of G.K.’s Weekly, Chesterton courageously challenged the political and economic establishment throughout the pages of his famous newspaper. His writing was so extensive that his two most famous books articulating the Distributist thesis, the influential The Outline of Sanity and the superb What’s Wrong with the World, offer us only a fraction of his political and economic thought. In every issue of G.K.’s Weekly, the erudite Chesterton challenged political and economic theorists whose hyperopic focus on the macroeconomic state of the nation, filled with statistics of industrial output, trade, and unemployment figures, failed to address the problems most pressing to the masses or the man on the street. Today, these cold and mathematical calculations continue to provide economists with the raw data necessary to predict and analyze the “boom and bust” market.

Economists project and examine because economists are always predicting and diagnosing, just like the weatherman and about as accurately. How economic factors affect quality of life for families, real people—the poor, the farmer, and the home—are left out of the equation. These economists cheer when unemployment stats decline, while the common man is left to ponder whether reductions in unemployment translate to earning a livelihood or earning a minimum wage. Economists advise our congressional leaders, the heads of banks, large-scale industry, and corporate goliaths about economic shifts and their impact on industry because they are under the impression that as a nation we rise and fall according to industrial production.

But mass-producing industries are not the solution to get the nation going. The revitalization of cottage industry is what we need in order to get the nation going; local economies; small firms; genuine relationships based on trust, reputation, love, dedication, and hard work. Cottage industry is about those closest to us: our households and communities; the rural towns; urban dwellers; real life and real people. Mass production breeds more mass production. Mass production does not see the value in the ‘thing’ created, but only how many quantities of that ‘thing’ produce token wealth.

Chesterton recognized how the powerful concentration of the mass production system severed widespread ownership, augmented the nation’s reliance on industry for its Gross Domestic Product, challenged the power of the State due to its size, and just how influential these large firms were in obtaining government subsidies and rescues (what we dub “too big to fail”), so that when they collapsed we collapsed with them. Unable to compete with the bargaining and lobbying powers of the factory, local production suffered as mass producers increasingly became the sole sources of wealth for local communities, paid unjust wages and offered unjust contracts to the worker, eliminated the ownership society, and, without loyalty to King or country, packed up and moved for greener pastures, leaving small towns in ruin as has become evident today in the United States.

Chesterton and the distributists were micro-economists who understood that the smaller picture is the bigger picture. The answer to our problems is micro because life is micro. It begins with the family on a plot of land and continues down the rural road, past our neighbor’s home and straight to the market square. Solving the problem of the masses builds a system resistant to the fracturing of the national economy and the tyranny of the board of directors. It restores the stable economic foundations necessary for family life and puts man back in touch with his humanity so he may concentrate on virtuous living through compliance with the Divine law. And it is only from this norm that any larger industry can grow. For Chesterton, an economy dominated by mass-produced goods could never replace the strength of a decentralized economy because ownership diversification also means self-reliance for small towns and for the small country. Local production for local consumption is a policy enabling the flow of an extensive variety of goods and services created by and sustaining the very community that makes them.

“We want to decentralize production, so that each district may tend to be self-supporting, we want to have little knots of craftsmen everywhere supplying the needs of the district which feeds them,” he wrote.

Chesterton never denied factories would continue to exist in a Distributive State. He simply asserted that any community with an economic foundation based on diverse ownership would offer men the choice of whether to work for themselves or sell their labor to capital, which means that, given this state of affairs, capitalists would be forced to pay a living wage and treat labor as co-creators of production instead of mere factors of production.

So what does ownership diversity within medium or large-scale manufacturing look like? Is there a solution? Yes. The answer is found in worker-ownership: the distributist cooperative.

Richard Aleman
Originally from Barcelona, Spain, Richard Aleman is the editor of The Hound of Distributism, a collection of essays by leading distributist authors from around the world, and Ven. Fulton J. Sheen's Justice & Charity. His articles have appeared in Catholic Rural Life, GILBERT, The Bellarmine Forum, Christus Rex, The Catholic Spirit, and Our Northland Diocese. He lives with his wife in South St. Paul, Minnesota.

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15 Comments

HGL, i presume that by “get them by spare parts of destroyed ones” that you mean blacksmiths could, in effect manufacture them. Even if so, the war is likely to be lost by the time they’d get enough to make a difference. I’m not sure about “Ammo is provided by enemy”. Do you mean that the non-industrialized force would steal it from their enemy? Their capacity to do so seems somewhat questionable.
The mountainous terrain of Afghanistan may indeed disfavor tanks in many cases. But this discussion, as i understand it, involves the general question of how a distributist economy would fare against a capitalist or socialist one in war. That would include a flat terrain as well, which wouldn’t have those advantages. The Kalashnikov felling a plane, that would have to be just about a perfect shot, one difficult to do. (Apologies, btw, for misspelling the name of the gun earlier, would have sworn that it had two “i”s.) One has to take into account too, that a plane can fly higher than any gun can reach.

All this may be moot, of course, if we accept that a distributist state could have industry, even mass production, as long as it were properly set up, as with as much localization as possible and with worker-ownership where centralization is unavoidable. It seems pertinent to cite Cecil Chesterton’s remark here, that distributism was as possible with a commercial or an industrial society as with an agrarian one. Btw, from what i’ve read, i think Afghanistan is more what i’d call a landlordist society than a distributist one.

HGL,
I see your point about the boot factories. It seems to prove my earlier point that a country with almost no industrial base cannot compete with the constant streams of weapons with which an industrialized country can provide itself. The CSA, with almost no industry of its own, was not able to get the outside supplies (and not just boots) to compete with the North which had a thriving industry. Boots were certainly important, but soldiers with good boots will still lose battles if they do not have a sufficient supply of the other things necessary for war. If the CSA had its own weapons industry, it might have been able to take that boot factory as you suggest. It might have been able to break the blockade. It might not have even needed to do these things in order to get weapons, boots, and other things needed to successfully fight the war. The North was able to mass produce boots, but if the South had a large enough and widely distributed enough boot making industry, they might not have had the shortage of boots the suffered even without having the factory to mass produce them. The CSA was too dependent on outside sources for even basic needs of everyday life like clothing and guns for hunting. There are two reasons they did as well as they did for as long as they did. The brilliance of General Lee and the unwillingness of the Union generals prior to Grant.

HGL,
The point – trying to get back to Richard’s article – is that a non-centralized industrial base leads to a more enriched and stable society. The collapse of one producer wouldn’t jeopardize the entire industry or threaten the economy of a large region as it does in many places today.
In terms of the US Civil War, you state that, “if the CSA had taken a US boot factory…” My point is that they had to in the first place. If they had their own boot industry, rather than needing to get boots from outside their own borders, they would also have resisted better. Also, if they had a boot making industry equal to the North, but also decentralized, they would have been better of than the North in regard to boots. The capture of a large centralized US boot factory would have been a serious blow to the troops of the USA, while the capture of a smaller producer that is part of a widely distributed industry would have a much smaller impact. The CSA even had difficulty supplying their own clothes because while they had a large cotton supply, they didn’t have much of a textile industry to transform the cotton into cloth.

HGL, the fact that a blacksmith can repair a Kalishnikov doesn’t mean (s)he can make one. And blacksmiths certainly can’t make tanks or planes, probably not even good body armor. For that you DO need industry, whether capitalist, distributist, or socialist.

One CAN get outside weaponry, but only if not successfully blockaded. That was why the CSA was unable to get needed supplies, the very strong naval cordon put there by the Union.

Excellent post. Invariably unless capital – including that in a manufacturing concern – is owned by labor (a distributist model) greed will polarize the two and destroy the efficiencies that large scale operations seek to produce.

A black smith can mend it. I do not know if a black smith can make kalashnikov bullets or of Afghanistan has sulphur and salpeter enough to make gunpowder for them.

But I do know that all warfare is under some kind of politics. Resisting is not just a matter of how good the opponent is, but also how much resources a general is given from his homeland.

US tactics in CSA territories, I am not sure it would not count as atrocities and thus be impossible to sustain from the West, as long as we have internet and freedom of information, and as long as troops depend on elected presidents for mandate.

Anyone could nuclear bomb resistance out of existence, if they have a nuclear bomb – UNLESS they are shy of committing atrocities, for reason stated, or similar ones.

If CSA troops had taken a US boot factory, used it during war and refused its continuation after war, they could have resisted better.

US kept their boots factories, and after winning war, allowed them to continue, making lots of cobblers out of work.

HGL,
I’m afraid I don’t see the point of your examples. Afghanistan competes because, unlike the CSA, it can get sufficient weapons to go against the attacks against it. You must also keep in mind that, as a country, we have not fully committed our available resources to this war in the same way as with the US Civil War or WWII. If we were using the same tactics as the USA did against the CSA and the Axis, the situation would be very different – especially considering the weapons that are available. The times when Switzerland and Austria competed (in war) against industrialized countries, they were either industrialized themselves or had outside suppliers to make up for the fact that they couldn’t on their own.

Also be careful with the assumption that Distributism = Less Industry. Distributism would be less likely to mass produce cheap junk but in the case of an armaments factory, this would more likely be a large organisation owned by a worker’s co-op. I would envision that that each factory would be a separate entity, but many could be associated with each other for the purposes of marketing, securing contracts etc. A worker-owned factory would be as efficient as a capitalist-owned factory run from the other side of the world.
Coll.

Brien,
I disagree with your assessment that the Civil War in the US is an example of your statement. The problem for the CSA was not that its industry was decentralized, but that it had almost no industry at all. This is the primary factor for the South’s loss. The question is not whether or not industry is wide-spread, it is really whether or not industry is sufficiently present. The North was able to build the ships and cannon necessary to blockade outside supplies from reaching the South. The South was not able to build sufficient ships and cannot to break the blockade, and whatever countries might have been willing to help the South were not willing to fight the North’s ships to do so.
A country with almost no industrial base cannot compete with the constant streams of weapons with which an industrialized country can provide itself. Wide spread industry could be a benefit in that a single bombing run won’t wipe out the entire production and that there would be many more supply lines rather than all lines leading back to the centralized production area. Had the South had this, the Union would have had a much more difficult time than it did. I would even venture to say that the cost to the North in lives may well have turned the public in the North against Lincoln’s insistence that the preservation of the Union was worth the cost. He had a difficult enough time as it was.

Which in turn brings up a question that may seem cynical and ‘long-term,’ but is nonetheless worrying: Can a distributist state or alliance sustain a war against an industrial nation of similar size?

Obviously, so much depends on culture and discipline – in both the military and the populace. But one thing is clear: the endless streams of ammo and materiel that fuel modern war will not be nearly as abundant for the decentralized nation.

The example of the CSA-USA war is a good one. The South had brilliant leadership, but was eventually ground down in a long war of attrition.

Machines for making shoes are great if a lot of soldiers need a lot of boots and most cobblers are drafted – like during USA-CSA War – but less great for giving cobblers back their jobs once the war is over. ECCO may be doing good shoes, but cobblers’ exams could include making ECCO type shoes. Now cobblers are mostly just repairing shoes (ECCO and other). Sigh …

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